The main pet peeve about chatbots is that now they're on almost every page, popping up with "I am here to help, what would you like to buy today" and the more atrocious ones that are implemented instead of a call center to reduce the number of human operators to the minimum possible.
Before LLMs I actually tried those chats a few times. If the bot had actually tried to solve my issue (or at least collect some basic data, then open a support ticket) I wouldn't have minded it.
However what actually happened was that it started the chat with some (pre-scripted) smalltalk, giving the impression I could just write my inquiry in freeform - then completely ignored my text and just asked me a series of scripted questions and directed me to a help page (which I already knew) in the end.
I think LLMs could really be an improvement here, because there is at least the possibility they could give you some answers that are actually tailored to your problem.
Of course it might just as well be that we'll now get a very charming and deeply empathetic response that exactly sums up the gist of your problem and then ... redirects you to the generic help page.
When I worked in an internal team at a bank, we chose to make a bot to replace the FAQ when the number of daily tickets where the response that could be summed up as 'rtfm' hit 30.
It might have been frustrating for the users, but at least we avoided basic questions and our tickets at least we're filled correctly.
I hacked a bypass for the secops who worked a lot with us and at least knew how to fill tickets.
To be honest it was a hack i did in a day instead of doing my real job because it was less boring, a week after the chat bot was online, I was not really on the support side (i automate stuff). I probably gave the bypass to 6 persons, documented it but i'm pretty sure no one on my team really knew it was there because i left a month later (and also, only one person from the original team was still there.
The real issue (it's also a response to the comment with management and no human interaction) was that our onboarding was shit. Not only our tools for our clients, but also our internal onboarding (i did work on that too in even if it wasn't my job, because i lost weeks in useless processes, to avoid new hires the same pain).
Make a tutorial for your tools. Two even. A long-winded one, and one with only the commandlines , executables and scripts.
> the more atrocious ones that are implemented instead of a call center to reduce the number of human operators to the minimum possible
This is what's driving me crazy. The stupid "I want to sell you our crap" chatbots are easy to block (uBlock rules exist for most of them, as they are often existing products integrated into websites) but the chatbots people are forced to engage with are the ones that exist to replace callcenter workers.
First companies reduced the influence and power of callcenter workers to make them useless for customers. Now they're saving a buck dumping human operators and letting the powerless chatbots tell the users "sorry but I can't change your situation, have a nice day".
With advances in voice synthesis, I expect chatbots to replace phone operators any day now, probably with a prompt like "you are a company X helpdesk operator. Try to upsell to any customer as much as you can, and try to make them feel pleased even if you can't help them solve their problems".
The Verizon website has the worst chatbot I've ever interacted with. It's the worst because it's mandatory and useless. It's just about the only way to start a tech support interaction, and it is completely incapable of actually solving any problems beyond telling you to power cycle. (Granted, probably half of all of Verizon's tech support problems can be solved by power cycling) But then it's also self-unaware and misleading. It will straight up tell you "yes, I can do that", and then twelve statements and twenty five minutes later tell you "sorry, I can't do that, you need to call this phone support number". What a shit pile. I hate chatbots and I also hate Verizon.
Now they're saving a buck dumping human operators and letting the powerless chatbots tell the users "sorry but I can't change your situation, have a nice day"
I saw a television ad a few days ago where the entire point of the ad was for the company to show off that it has real, live customer service people answering the phones in Arizona.
"I'm Brittany, and I'm a real human being, here to help you!"
It was the one tiny glimmer of hope that the market may sort this out. But it won't.
Call centers themselves are implemented as a way to reduce the number of human operators to the minimum possible. Used to work on dashboard software that monitors them (almost 20 years ago), and it's a metric of organizational success when you get a caller off the line without letting them talk to a human. All the hoop jumping and maze-like options etc are explicitly for this purpose.
Even back then there was talk about when chatbots would be good enough to remove as many humans as possible from the process. And considering how low paid some contact center workers are, it's pretty sad.
Yes. One of the systems was called "adherence." TSYS was using it in 2007 or so. Calls were supposed to be resolved within a certain time or you were penalized.
Same with your arrival time, bathroom breaks, lunch, leaving. You are/were tracked by the minute and penalized for any deviation in either direction. And they canned people all the time for straying too much.
It was the most sadistic workplace I've seen in the first world.
They don't just pop up - they pop up the moment the page loads, getting in your way.
A little bit tuning, say, to keep the popup from happening until the browser has been idle for N seconds, would go a long long way to reducing this frustration.
Yeah, I really don't want to talk to a chatbot.